by Tom Deitz
“Indeed you did,” came Regan’s voice, sounding unexpectedly decisive. “You lost one of our few remaining weapons, for one thing. Leaving the shirt was no bad notion, but casting your spear away thereafter was.”
“Too late to cry over that spilt milk, though,” Uncle Dale interjected. “Best we be hightailin’ it, since we don’t have but one horse now! That’ll set us back, some.”
“Aye,” Regan agreed. “Froech, since we have lost Firearrow, you must be our Tracker now.”
“As you will, Lady,” he replied, “if someone will see to Nuada.”
Uncle Dale and Alec braced the wounded Faery while Froech slid off Snowwhisper’s back and Regan resumed her accustomed seat. “The trail leads away from the lake, I think,” Froech said after a moment spent examining Ailill’s spoor.
“And let us hope nothing chooses to follow us,” Regan added, “for Nuada is beyond my help now. Only his own will sustains him.”
And Alec, who heard this, could only shudder.
Chapter XXXVI: Off the Track
(The Straight Tracks)
Pain was all the world, and all the world was pain.
And Ailill-who-was-a-deer could not escape it.
He had tried, had run till he could run no farther; walked until that effort, too, became too great; now staggered on, though all he wanted was to rest, to sleep the dreamless sleep of tired beasts.
But he must keep on, for Faerie had laid a call on him, which he could neither answer nor ignore. And now a newer, more compelling summons dragged at him as well, to which he could respond.
Morwyn’s spell had found him, had he but known. And it drew him like a salmon on a line.
He fell, tried to rise, fell again, felt muscles rip along his wounded haunch, felt his skin tear as rough rocks grabbed it. Cracked an antler. The sun beat against him: too hot, and the air too wet.
Finally he rose, followed the Track, followed the Call. The gold was before him and that was enough.
He was fading quickly now. Ailill was almost gone, a pale shadow traced upon a well-drawn map of bestial instinct: dreaming and walking—running sometimes—all in a fog of pain.
A wall of rock rose up before him, shocked him almost awake. A cleft broke the brightness of the sun’s glare on a thousand flecks of mica. The Track led there: a promise of coolness at the heart of the mountain.
He entered, passing under a veil of water that he scarcely felt. Darkness enfolded him; his antlers scraped against damp stone. The Track was the only light.
The way narrowed; the Track carried him forward. Air rushed in around him as the ground dropped away, leaving him suspended on a narrow span of Rock almost too slender for even his own narrow body.
But the Track was ahead, drawing him on, comforting him, filling him with strength of a kind, if only he could remember its purpose.
He paused, one foot raised, flicked an ear. There was that other Call again.
But he liked the Track better. He’d go that way.
Or would he?
A step; a misstep—and then he was falling . . .
The Track whirled away, and with it his sparse security; all in a spin of Worlds and images and flashes of dark and light as two things called out to him: a woman, and a place he could never reach—
Falling . . .
Farther than the ground had any right to be. Farther than it could have been. The man-part jerked awake, felt panic, expected pain—but there was none.
The world spun; the darkness was swept away.
Pines loomed around him; hard red earth pressed up against feet that were suddenly upright. Smells floated upon the air: the odors of a forest late at night when morning starts its final dreaming.
Where was the Track? Nowhere, it seemed; at least, he did not sense it. You . . . we fell off, Ailill told himself.
Deer instincts drowned him, asserting their own desire. There was a road, and it lead downhill. He’d follow that; perhaps there would be a Track beyond it. He smelled water. That would be nice, too.
Trees closed in, a looming tunnel of black and midnight green. He entered it, enjoying the feel of soft moss under hooves worn tender from running.
A clearing opened before him; light sprang into his eyes—moonlight. A persistent tinkle to his left became a waterfall sliding down rocks into a shallow pool. A shadow to his back sharpened to a wall of trees arcing from mountain to the top of a precipice beyond which more distant mountains slept under summer stars, under Cygnus the swan.
Under a cross that burned in the sky almost straight overhead.
It was a beautiful place. A place to rest, to ignore the Calls for a while and sleep. He’d have a look at that pointed mountain there, and then he’d sleep.
That pointed mountain. He’d seen it before!
Half his consciousness shattered. The older part, the stronger part gleamed forth, banished the deer-mind utterly.
Ailill Windmaster came full awake.
I know this place, the dark Faery thought. Lookout Rock, men call it: David Sullivan’s private Place of Power.
“And ours too,” Fionna said, as she stepped from behind him, smiling.
Chapter XXXVII: To the Vault
(Tir-Nan-Og)
David gazed back down the way he had come and shuddered in disbelief. Lugh’s palace had looked close by, but it had taken him excruciating hours to reach: hours of stalking along paths, or scrambling over walls, or skulking through gardens, or trudging up endless steep flights of stairs. His legs were sore from the constant climbing and the extra weight he carried. And his shoulders were beginning to protest as well, for exactly those same reasons. He was starting to get worried, too: there had been trees of every kind, and flowers—even, to his shock, a stand of Cherokee roses. But no animals. And no Sidhe.
But surely I must be almost there, he thought, as he paused for breath among a stand of redwoods. Surely soon, as he struck off uphill once more. He negotiated a switchback in the gravel path he’d been following among the stringy red trunks—and gasped a sigh of relief. Three hundred yards to his right the huge outer gates to Lugh’s palace gaped wide open in ominous invitation.
But there was still no sign of the Iron Road, though the sword yet led him on, its insistent tugging bringing him ever closer to the heart of Lugh’s kingdom.
Where is everybody?
Silence reigned, and emptiness. David found himself wondering just how many Sidhe there were. Millions? Thousands? Maybe only hundreds? Were they stretched so thin and tenuous across Tir-Nan-Og that even in their own country they were seldom seen? Or was something else afoot? He was nearing the center of the web now, and the spider still hadn’t shown.
He couldn’t stand it any longer. It was time to begin, time to put on the cloak.
Morwyn had warned him about it once again, aboard ship. It might make him sick, she had said; the material was so insubstantial that once unrolled it would last but a little while.
Sticking the sword firmly into the ground, he withdrew the folded fabric from its pouch, shook it out, and settled it across his shoulders; felt rather than saw the intricate clasp click shut at his throat. A chirp of protest by his cheek told him the lizard was not happy with that arrangement, and a scurrying by his ear indicated that it was seeking higher sanctuary by the protruding collar of his padded gambeson. He grinned and felt for it with his finger, to be rewarded with another chirp and a flick of tongue across his knuckle.
And then the cloak began to take effect, as it suited itself to the rhythms of his body. David did not actually disappear—from his own point of view—but he began to feel vaguely stretched, wrenched a little sideways or inside out. As if his skin and muscle and organs and bones were each a quarter-turn out of synch with one another.
His head spun, and he staggered a step. Squinting back the brief spell of dizziness, he retrieved the sword and balanced the blade once more on his palm. The point swung hard left toward a stand of redwoods a little way off the path. He let it le
ad him, moving as quietly as he could. A quick glance down showed him his own body, clear and solid as ever—but he seemed to have no shadow.
The cloak was working.
The point of the sword began to tip downward.
He followed it quickly, and then more quickly as its tug became stronger. David knew that he must be drawing very near the entrance.
So intent was he in following the pull, in fact, that he was caught unaware when the sword suddenly thumped home against the side of a huge gray boulder set artfully in the steep hillside between two of the larger trees.
He looked up, incredulous, and with more than a little irritation. The boulder towered three times his own height above his head, its sides covered with a heavy encrustation of lichen. He thought he could make out some half-obscured carving there, paused and scratched his chin, then reached for the sword to scrape off some of the thick, gray impediment.
A sharp tug at the hilt succeeded in bringing the blade free of the stone. But as soon as he relaxed his grip, the sword shot forward again—to embed itself to the quillons in the rock. He jerked at it, but it would not come out. Tugged it from side to side; no luck. Twisted—
The rock moved.
Twisted more.
Abruptly the sword slid free, sending David skidding onto his backside. He stood up and dusted himself off, then returned to the rock. His efforts had ripped loose a section of lichen taller than he was.
No, not loose, he discovered when he examined it more closely. The rock behind was hinged, displaying a crack of opening barely wide enough to admit him.
The sword fought his grip like a fistful of angry fish, tore itself free and went skittering along the carpet of redwood needles directly into that opening.
A clink. A whiff of stale air.
David had found the Iron Road.
He entered cautiously, suddenly aware as he bent to retrieve the sword that he had brought no light.
But light did not seem to be necessary, for the walls around him glowed of their own accord, a weak, fitful glimmer that slipped across slick, curved surfaces: the glass walls of the Iron Road.
David crept back to the doorway, pulled it as nearly shut as he could without an inside handle, and set off.
The way was wide enough for two men to walk abreast with their arms outspread, the arching glass ceiling at least that distance above him. The floor was smooth and patinaed the brownish-black of old metal. It sloped gradually downward in a line that was as straight as one of the Tracks. David’s footfalls sounded strangely dull against its surface.
He did not have to walk long before the Iron Road ended abruptly in a plain semicircular archway. Beyond it, he could make out the topmost treads of a narrow, spiral staircase. He sighed, glanced back one final time, and entered.
The stairs went down in a tight twist of iron and dark glass, and he was reminded unpleasantly of the swirling motion of the pillar of fire. But at least he was less queasy now. In fact, he realized, he was feeling stronger by the moment, almost exactly like that peculiar jolt of vigor he had experienced after drinking from the well. He paused, took another long swig of that same water, and pressed on.
He felt better immediately, more energetic at each step, his senses clearer, his nerves infinitely more calm. It was not what he had expected at all.
Down and down and down.
One final turn, and David found himself facing another sheet of opaque black glass. He touched that smooth surface, pushed harder, to no avail.
“Well, shit!” he muttered. “This was bound to be more complicated than Morwyn let on. So here I stand at the bottom of a friggin’ staircase with a blank wall in front of me and no bloody way to get through.”
Irritably he sank down on the small landing at the foot of the stairs, and as he did, the tip of the sword slipped from his casual grip and tapped against the bottom of the glass wall.
Something clicked.
David found himself gazing through a low archway into the place he’d been seeking.
He leapt to his feet, then peered warily out.
—And caught his breath:
Lugh’s treasure chamber was a circular, high-vaulted room, big as the domed space of a cathedral. It rather reminded David of a picture he’d seen of the interior of Hagia Sophia—except that here the walls were broken up by a soaring ribwork of pillars, with the spaces between ablaze with mosaicked interlaces in blue and gold and emerald.
In the center of the room—perhaps a hundred feet away—a smaller openwork dome like a small pavilion rose atop eight slender columns of ivory, the sides between wrought of pierced stonework set with jewels. Through the lattice, David could make out a dazzling array of colors and textures.
An unsourced light filled the place, and now that he examined the room more closely, there was a vague distortion surrounding the smaller structure. By squinting slightly, he could see the shimmer of glass walls that rose from a pattern of concentric circles on the floor. Half of those circles were pale, dull-toned stone (the better not to distract from the hoard, David supposed), the others of the same brownish-black metal as the Iron Road. Indeed, the single odor that he noticed was the sour smell of hot metal, like a foundry or a forge. No Faery could cross that floor, he knew. Not even Lugh, unless he used his rune, and from what Morwyn had intimated about the nature of the sealed borders, he doubted the High King could even do that at the moment.
Taking a deep breath, David stepped onto the outermost circle of floor—a pale one—and found to his surprise that the smooth stone pulsed gently beneath his feet.
He almost bumped into the first wall of glass before he saw it, but a sharp chirp from the lizard served to warn him, and he found himself compelled to slide his fingers along the transparent surface until he found an opening.
Through it, and he was on iron. The sensation of heat and the throbbing of the floor became instantly stronger. He crossed to the inner wall, began feeling along it, and had to make almost a full circuit before he found the next doorway. Along the way he discovered that both the iron circles and the walls were rotating slowly—and not all in the same direction—so that what was the straightest path going in would not necessarily be the straightest one coming out.
Then he was on stone again, and then on iron once more and feeling the wall for the last opening in the final wall of glass.
An instant later he was standing on the rough-textured limestone that encircled the Vault of Lugh Samildinach.
It had been too easy, David knew. No way could he have sailed a huge, gaudy ship along the coast of Tir-Nan-Og, crossed overland several miles through open country, then walked brazenly into a place he had never seen before to find its most precious artifacts unguarded by anyone or anything—and all the while passing its most potent wards and protections without a hitch.
Unless something was very wrong.
Yet he had no idea what it was, though he was more certain than ever that he was a particularly gullible fly. Whether Lugh was the spider, or Morwyn, or someone he had never met, he didn’t know. Perhaps this was all part of a scheme to destroy him. Perhaps Ailill was not Morwyn’s former lover at all, but her brother, or some other close kin, and this was an elaborate plan for revenge. Perhaps Morwyn and Ailill were even now watching his progress by some arcane means. Perhaps he was meant to disappear for well and good, thereby providing added impetus for Ailill’s long-sought war with humanity.
Yeah, that made sense: send a human to steal a valuable Faery artifact, and the human naturally gets killed, but he also gets the blame, and maybe Lugh gets really pissed at the human race in general and decides to have it out with them once and for all.
Why else would the High King not have acted, if the Horn of Annwyn was the most precious thing in his kingdom?
Unless David was being set up. Unless Lugh wanted him to take the Horn, had some plan of his own of which David was unwitting executor.
But that didn’t make sense either, because if Lugh and Morwyn had
been working together to contrive Ailill’s downfall, he saw no reason why the Ard Rhi would not simply have given her the Horn, or used it himself. What was the Horn, for that matter? What did it do? He didn’t really know.
No, it was simply too easy.
Still, he knew, he had no choice but to fulfill the quest as best he could. That in mind, he squared his shoulders and turned toward the lacy metal gateway of the pavilion.
And then something moved among the tangled vaults overhead, wrenching him abruptly from his reverie. A shadow fled across the floor before him. He jerked his head up in horror, found he had raised the sword by pure instinct, then hesitated, staring at the blade foolishly. He didn’t want to kill unless he had to, wasn’t even certain he knew how, but—
Something was falling toward him, falling fast. Something he had mistaken for a carved decoration upon the ceiling: a shape of silver-gray that seemed all talons and wings and scales and teeth.
And that would be upon him in a bare instant.
Sword up again, higher—too late.
But whatever it was did not smash him to the floor. At the last possible moment, it swooped toward the opening of the pavilion where it landed neatly, its feather-eared head towering twice his height in the air. Tiny silver scales glittered across its body.
It’s a wyvern! David almost gasped aloud; it looked just like the pictures he had seen in heraldry books. All at once he felt very guilty about the material from which his boots and scabbard and pouch were made.
The wywern advanced a step. Its neck snaked down to eye level.
David backed away, assuming a defensive stance he had never consciously learned—The sword’s influence? he wondered. What had Morwyn said? Perhaps the sword will find a way to use you, then?
The wyvern squinted in his direction, its tongue flicking, barbed tail thrashing across the floor. Its red eyes narrowed, and its nostrils flared. The fanlike ears twitched at his every breath.
It knows I’m here.
The creature folded in upon itself, squatting on hind legs like those of an immense ostrich; coiled its neck even lower.
